Jun. 27--No one bothered to listen to the notes of discord, blinded as the dealmakers were with visions of fast profits and huge fees.

Long before LyondellBasell's $12.7 billion merger unraveled into bankruptcy earlier this year, people directly involved in the deal feared it would end badly, documents filed recently in the Chapter 11 case show.

In July 2007, Dutch chemical company Basell agreed to buy Houston-based Lyondell. Basell was a unit of privately held Access Industries, controlled by billionaire financier Leonard Blavatnik. Blavatnik hoped to use Basell to build a larger global chemical company through acquisitions.

Access, though, paid $48 a share for Lyondell, a 45 percent premium, even as a global slump was hitting the chemical industry. Within a year, the company was crumbling under the massive debt from the leveraged deal.

Access' courtship of Lyondell actually began in April 2006. Several early advances were rebuffed by Lyondell's board, which found the offering price too low, according to the filing.

Within Access, though, executives thought even some of those lower bids were a recipe for failure. Projections worked up by Merrill Lynch showing the deal could be viable at $38 a share were met with "a chorus of concern and skepticism," according to a lawsuit the unsecured creditors committee wants to file against company officials and investment banks that helped put the merger together.

Unsecured creditors hope to recover billions in claims ; the exact amount they're owed won't be determined until after the June 30 deadline for filing claims, said John Elstad, an attorney with Brown Rudnick in Boston who represents the unsecured creditors committee.

The creditors' suit was attached to a motion filed last week asking the judge overseelng LyondellBasell's bankruptcy for permission to sue Blavatnik and his affiliates. Almost half of the 140-page document was redacted by the court, pending a hearing next month

An unredacted copy paints in excruciating detail a portrait of blind greed that drove into insolvency one of the world's biggest chemical companies, which has seven plants and employs more than 4,000 in the Houston area.

Elstad declined to comment on the suit's allegations, as did spokesmen for Access and Merrill.

E-mails from Access executives, cited in the suit, portray Blavatnik as obsessed with landing Lyondell at any cost, having lost bids for Huntsman and other chemical companies.